Statement of motivation in connection with the presentation of Anna Klindt Sørensen's Grant on January 18, 2008.
Moulding matter with the greatest possible precision – this could be said to be the key to Elisabeth Bergsøe's art.
In this respect, there is a line that can be traced back to the art and ideas of Aksel Jørgensen, leading right through the art of his pupil, Erling Frederiksen, most especially in his work with composition and his colour experiments – that finds it way into Elisabeth Bergsøe's art.
A case in point can be spotted in Jørgensen's writings from the 1940s* in which Aksel Jørgensen writes so beautifully and in such fantastic detail about colour, about mankind's colour-relation to nature – that nature itself blends by means of the sun's light, about the colours' inherent character and about artists' perception of nature as colour.
As a painter, as a sculptor and as a teacher, Erling Frederiksen carried these ideas further along constructive paths, striving towards a synthesis of the welter of visual impressions abounding.
In the process of working with her early drawings of Egyptian sculptures, at Erling Frederiksen's School of Drawing at the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Elisabeth Bergsøe ventured into the realm of observed space's limitless possibilities, in order to amalgamate a vast range of visual impressions – of altering and adding on, of amplifying and subsequently rejecting. Only to start all over, again and again. Eventually, the space around the sculpture came to matter just as much as the form being studied and the whole process of observing and rendering – carried out with the utmost dedication and concentration – seemed as if it could go on indefinitely, as more and more aspects emerged and were perceived.
At the Danish Royal Academy of Art's School of Sculpture, these stringent studies were honed to further perfection. The professor of the department, Svend Wiig Hansen, must have recognized the value of this intensely uncompromising approach, so characteristic of Elisabeth Bergsøe, and must have granted her all the latitude she needed in order to persevere in this particular single-minded way of hers.
In her paintings, Elisabeth Bergsøe progressed from working with the direct observation to consolidating the vehicles for expression in the pictures into simple and almost architectural forms.
The artist herself expresses it in this way: “ I'm struggling to achieve a certain objective but it keeps changing through a process of distillation, all the way up until the moment that the work is finally complete. What it is that serves to simplify the result is my becoming cognisant of unsuccessful attempts to interpolate elements – unsuccessful either because they are not rigorous enough and interfere with the composition of the picture or because they give rise to juxtapositions and interact in a way that clashes with the totality. The essential thing, however, is that the resulting picture still has to encompass as many elements as possible, as many visually distinct expressions of feeling as possible, and that it still conveys the fascination and the enjoyment of playing with sizes, colours, and spaces.
Timelessness is a characteristic of all good art; this fact is probably even more pronounced in concretist art. It doesn't actually happen very often that one, as a viewer, steps into the situation that, simply by standing in front of a mere expanse of colour in the room, we can immediately recognize which artist happens to be unfolding his or her work right here.
However, when you stand in front of an artwork by Elisabeth Bergsøe, there is no doubt about the identity of the painter, whether this is triggered off by the slender coloured figures which, like lines in an ever-moving composition, give rise to an infinite space, or whether this happens when contemplating the larger monochrome paintings.
It is as if the colour of these monochromes becomes an almost physically manifest presence in the room, sometimes moving in quite closely toward the viewer and other times moving away – at times warm and intense and at other times coolly distant, at times in motion and at other times standing still. The colour alone now is the painting, embodying the considerations and experience of all the preceding years. But the works also possess an intense emotional depth that increases the longer we contemplate them.
This is yet another aspect that calls to mind what Aksel Jørgensen pointed out about the emotive character of colours.
Others have taken notice of Elisabeth Bergsøe:
In 1981, the lithographic artist Palle Nielsen wrote about her pictures: “The natural expressive force that emanates from these pictures serves, actually, to render futile any attempt to give prominence to figurative qualities. Words can only inadequately describe what these works express. This must be because these pictures seem to have been completely filled out; they represent themselves as pictures, self-contained, and borne forth by the deepest necessity.”
For your thorough and unwaveringly consistent work with colour, composition, and space, and for your determination, irrespective of the vicissitudes of time, we are delighted to award you Anna Klindt Sørensen's Grant.
Lene Rasmussen, January 2008.
*See “Farven” (On colour), from Aksel Jørgensen, Gnisten og Ilden – udvalgte artikler og foredrag (The Spark and The Flame - selected articles and lectures), Henning Poul Kristensen (Silkeborg), 1997, p. 53
